Young, talented and hardworking

“Before starting my internship in Telenor, I have always thought employees in large companies are dealing with annoying work pressures and job stress. Instead, I found a pleasant working atmosphere, high qualified employees, state of the art projects, and what is the most admirable, the relationship between people built on trust and their responsibility,” says Sepideh Kanani, who studies 4^th year on NTNU (Norwegian Institute for Science and Technology) in Trondheim.

Sepideh is one of three NTNU students who worked this summer with Telenor’s Research in Trondheim, preparing the test environment for the Next on Cloud Computing project. The project explores business opportunities for Telenor generated by the cloud computing.

 

Innovating with students
“By engaging these students we managed to have the testing infrastructure in place in a shorter period of time. On the other hand, as potential employees they got a chance to see how we work in Telenor and what kind of interesting technological challenges we meet here.  This is also a good way of working together with Universities in an open innovation model, where we can contribute to education and the direction of research on the University,” says Humberto Castejon, researcher in Research and Future Studies (RFS), adding that choosing three interns among 12 excellent students and applicants, was not an easy job.

The Telenor research hub in Tromsø, welcomed five interns as part of the co-operation with University of Tromsø and Norwegian Research Council. The students designed and implemented NFC related services, such as payment via mobile (in the form of a prepaid coffee card), using the phone as the apartment key, a training related service at the students’ gym and several NFC enabled information services  on the student campus. Their work was part of the NFC City project, driven by the team of Telenor’s researchers Arne Munch-Ellingsen, Bente Evjemo and Sigmund Akselsen in Tromsø.

Real problems and real deliveries
While five interns up north explored NFC services, three guys in their twenties worked hard at Telenor’s offices at Fornebu – analyzing how the use of IPv6 can improve signaling in mobile networks. The need for improved signaling is a consequence of increased number of smartphones in the networks and thus increased signaling traffic in the networks.

It was the third year in a row that Telenor Norway offered summer internships. Ole Kristian Håkonsen Fosse and Ole-Petter Olsen, both studying the 4th year at NTNU, Communication technology and Computer Engineering respectively, and Sami Sarinc, 5th year of Informatics at the University of Oslo, explored how signaling traffic can be decreased by changing communication pattern among applications.

“They have worked hard and came up with some interesting results that we are going to use and take further”, says  Magne Eimot, from Telenor Norway’s Technology, responsible for the IPv6 project.

“This was not the first time we had interns in the IPv6 project and based on our experience it is a good way to work with certain issues intensively over a shorter period of time. The interns did some good work for Telenor, while getting valuable working experience”, he added.

“Satisfied students and satisfied project managers! Our aim is to have an attractive and structured offer for students, that would help us recruit the people with expertise that we will need in the years to come,” says Amira Delnezirovic, from Telenor Norway’s HR, who runs the Internship project.
“We offer two to four projects a year, enabling students to experience the real professional challenges and deliverables. On the other hand, Telenor establishes relationship with young and talented people who can certainly contribute to our business today and in future.”

Summer days are over
The contact with interns does not stop after the summer. In fact, a few of those who were interviewed for intern positions in Trondheim, have also chosen Telenor’s researchers as supervisors in their projects at the University.

Sepideh Kanani is one of them. She is now working on the project “Cloud Brokering for QoS” with supervision of Humberto Castejon and Astrid Undheim from RFS. Only a year ago, she heard about Cloud Computing for the first time.

“Having heard that it is the wave of future, I was curious to learn more about it. I did some reading and attended a few virtual conferences, but honestly I got my main knowledge in this area by working in Telenor,” she said.

 

Read more about Trainee and Internship arrangements in the Telenor Group